HMS Crispin (R68): Training Ship at Londonderry, Then Twenty Four Years as PNS Jahangir

Craccher

HMS Crispin was one of the Cr group of the C Class destroyers, the last of the wartime emergency destroyers. She was laid down at J.

Samuel White's yard at Cowes on the Isle of Wight in February 1944 under the name Craccher, one of the old names the Admiralty had chosen for the group, and was renamed Crispin before she was finished. She was launched on 23 June 1945 and commissioned on 10 July 1946, a year after the war had ended.

The photograph at the top of this page shows her that year, at anchor on a glassy sea, with her pennant number painted large on her pale hull. Her sister Creole, built in the same yard, has her own article on these pages.

Londonderry

She spent her Royal Navy years in home waters, with the 3rd Training Squadron at Londonderry, where the Navy trained its ships and men in anti-submarine warfare.

The lessons of the Battle of the Atlantic had been bought dearly, and with the Soviet Union building a large submarine fleet the Navy was determined not to lose them; the Londonderry squadron worked with submarines and aircraft in the waters off the north of Ireland, where the escorts had fought the U-boats a few years before.

In 1948 her B gun, the second of her two forward mountings, was removed and a deckhouse built in its place, to fit her for the training role. In June 1953 she was at Spithead for the Coronation Review of the Fleet, and afterwards she was placed in reserve.

PNS Jahangir

In February 1956 she was sold to Pakistan, under an arrangement supported by the United States, along with her sister Creole.

Before handing her over she was taken in hand by Thornycroft at Woolston for modernisation, which gave her new anti-submarine weapons in the form of two Squid mortars and updated equipment, and in 1958 she was handed over at Southampton and commissioned into the Pakistan Navy as Jahangir, named after the Mughal emperor.

Her sister Creole became Alamgir, Charity became Shah Jahan, and Chivalrous had already served as Taimur.

Jahangir served from Karachi for twenty four years, a span that took in Pakistan's wars with India in 1965 and 1971, until she was removed from service and broken up in 1982. Her sisters are in the C Class destroyers collection.